The battle for control of music we own and/or purchase (!) continues as software and hardware devices are pitted against each other, bypassing controls and copyright issues, as the consumer drives demand. Read: Wired News: IPod Plug-In Sets Music Free

Tuesday, 17 May 2005

On second listen I understood the passion and energy and melodies within this powerful album. Plenty of strong, memorable songs; a little Franz Ferdianand in its energy, but something of Talking Heads in there as well for me, and some melancholy and sadness thrown in. Well worth a listen, he said in a cliched reviewer style. CD WOW! - Arcade Fire - Funeral

Where I'm living its Labour out, Conservative in. I voted Lib Dem, not a Tory fan, and not impressed with Labour's Helen Clark. See: Guardian Unlimited Politics | Aristotle | Peterborough. Oh and best of luck Tony B. you may have been a fool before, but just don't let the poeple down again!

Tuesday, 3 May 2005

An often forgotten or ignored part of the production process, that can go along way to making a site work or fail. Read: Usability testing without a budget | 456 Berea Street: "It doesn’t really matter how much you know about usability – after working on a project for a couple of weeks you’ve become blind to many of the problems."

Monday, 2 May 2005

THE ELECTION, T-MINUS 3 DAYS: The war on Iraq was a sham, it wasn't even much of a war, we invaded, booted out Saddam, because George said so, then realised that's where the plan ended. Now the fallout from the episode is continuing to haunt Tony Blair, Guardian Unlimited Politics | Election 2005 | New British death returns war to election spotlight. Yes he was a fool for trusting a fool, but what's done is done, and if it's proven that he has broken laws, then he's got to go, but if not, and all the other MPs backed him up, then the other parties should stop putting up this smoke-screen and start telling the public what the future holds for Britain, rather than continuing to rake up the past.

It's mostly ifs and buts now, and we the people, NEED to know what will happen about education, crime, the environment - although by the sounds of it, someone had better remind the Conservatives about that. These are the things that will make a difference to the lives of the majority of the British public over the next five years. Unless of course George has more crazy taking-over-the-world-because-we-need-more-oil ideas.

INTERNET: The way things are. Sorry to rip a huge chunk of comment from Kottke's comments in A whole new internet? (kottke.org), but it's all true, after the dot com bust, companies panicked and only gave out money to develop sure-fire ways of getting a return on investment, while developing ideas and creative staff was not on many lists.

Read more: "When the dot com economy was crumbling in 2000 and 2001, I remember thinking at the time that although everyone I knew was out of work (myself included), that is was a good thing for the long term. One of the more pleasant side effects of the dot com boom was that billions of dollars were spent training indivduals how to design web sites, program, write, etc. In the years following the bust, when all those people were suddenly unemployed or stuck in high-paying jobs that they didn't care for very much but needed to pay the bills, they responded by starting to tinker around with all sorts of neat things, just for the hell of it. Because they could, because they wanted to, not because they had an artificial deadline to reach or some arbitrary client requests to satisfy."

Closing thoughts

Richard Kendall 2003-2009Disclaimer: The views expressed on richardkendall.blogspot.com are those of me, Richard Kendall and not of my employers. And I'm not responsible for the content of external sites and cannot guarantee that every link will work!